There's also other design shapes, one of which I'm a little familiar with being Skylifter, that is saucer shaped. Their target audience is heavy lift, but they were very intent on minimizing wind effects and so chose that shape.
This specific shape though will be suitable a lot of the time for a lot of missions, and may even be more cost effective than a different shape - my non-CFD'd thought here is that the long skinny shape will likely get more lift from flow than a saucer. Maybe someone has done that research, as I'd love to read through it.
Gusty wind is more complex as it depends on cumulative drag factor. You can estimate their forward drag by knowledge about the motors they are using (energy -> drag work).
Likely, unless their motors are tiny, the even the forward drag is quite high. This is why their max speed is not something like 300km/h.
TLDR: its just like airplanes only much worse
Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.
I think that may be a misleading way to put it.
"Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft"
When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.
Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.
Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower."
[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...
Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...